Deviant social behavior has increasingly been medicalized in Western societies. That is, societies have come to rely on the medical profession to provide solutions to a wide array of problems. This dissertation advances sociological theory by illustrating how medicalization, as a social process, is constructed within and across advanced, industrialized nations. While scholars have paid much attention to medicalization in the United States, a comparative perspective is sorely needed to understand how medicalization processes differ across context. I develop a new theoretical approach to understand the construction of social processes and apply it to the medicalization of mental health. This approach considers how actors embedded within national realities construct responses to mental health problems. It also conceptualizes how medicalization is changing over time, arguing that both the principles and forms of medicalization are changing, and it addresses medicalization at three different levels within nations.

To examine the effect of globalization, the welfare state, and professional power on medicalization and to understand the underlying mechanisms, this dissertation asks three interrelated questions. First, do globalization, the social organization of the welfare state, and professional power impact medicalization of mental health across societies? To gain an understanding of the local and global context surrounding medicalization, the second question is: What is the cultural and political landscape surrounding medicalization of mental health across different welfare state regimes? Finally, to link macro-processes and individual action, the third question is: How do globalization and the social organization of the welfare state impact national actors? These three questions are answered using multiple methods and multiple sources of data.

The findings illustrate that globalization, the welfare state, and professional power play a key role in understanding how mental health has been medicalized. Most importantly, the findings indicate that these processes matter differently across context and between national stakeholders. The key contributions of this dissertation include the development of general theoretical approach to social processes that can be extended beyond medicalization and the nations and time-periods explored, and the establishment of basic empirical findings that show the importance of the global and local in creating national realities.